Bitcoin takes the first step against quantum computing, BIP 360 officially enters the protocol improvement proposal repository

Deep Tide TechFlow News, February 23 — According to Forbes, Bitcoin core developer Murch announced on February 11 that BIP 360 (Pay to Merkle Root, P2MR) has officially been added to the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal repository, marking the first time the Bitcoin development community has incorporated quantum resistance capabilities into the official technical roadmap. The proposal was jointly authored by Hunter Beast, Ethan Heilman, and Isabel Foxen Duke. It is currently under review and discussion, with no protocol changes activated yet.

The core design of BIP 360 is based on the Taproot architecture, introducing a new output type called P2MR. By hiding the public key within the Merkle tree root hash, it eliminates the risk of long-term public key exposure on the blockchain, thereby defending against potential attacks where quantum computers use Shor’s algorithm to derive private keys from public keys. P2MR is an additional option rather than a replacement for existing formats, allowing users to choose when to migrate. Co-author Heilman noted that BIP 360 is only the “first step,” and full quantum security will require the introduction of post-quantum signature algorithms as subsequent measures.

Regarding the scale of risk, a report published by the Human Rights Foundation in October 2025 indicates that approximately 1.72 million bitcoins (over $115 billion) stored in early address formats face a high risk of quantum attack; another 4.49 million bitcoins (about $300 billion) could be protected through address migration, totaling roughly 31% of the total circulating supply of Bitcoin.

In terms of timeline, Google has lowered its estimate of the number of quantum bits needed to crack RSA 2048 encryption from tens of millions to 900,000 in 2025. The latest preprint paper suggests the threshold could be below 100,000 qubits. Caltech President Thomas Rosenbaum predicts that fault-tolerant quantum computers may appear within five to seven years. The U.S. federal government has mandated the phasing out of ECDSA encryption by 2035, and the Department of Defense has set an internal quantum readiness deadline for 2030.

If the Bitcoin community initiates and reaches consensus immediately, a comprehensive quantum-resistant upgrade is still expected to take about seven years, covering BIP approval, code review, community consensus building, activation, and full ecosystem upgrade.